Adept AIAcquired
ACT-1 and the original computer-use agents — team joined Amazon.
Adept pioneered general-purpose agents that operate software via ACT-1/ACT-2. In 2024 much of the team joined Amazon's AGI lab — an early, emblematic consolidation of the harness layer into big tech.
Related startups
Cognition
Devin, the AI software engineer, and the Windsurf IDE.
Cognition builds Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer that plans and executes engineering tasks end-to-end, and acquired the Windsurf agentic IDE in 2025. One of the defining startups of the coding-agent wave.
Sierra
Conversational AI agents for customer experience.
Sierra, co-founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, builds production conversational agents that resolve real customer issues with guardrails, evaluation and human escalation — a template for deploying vertical agents at the enterprise edge.
Cursor (Anysphere)
The AI-native code editor where agent mode lives.
Cursor rebuilt the IDE around models: tab completion, in-editor chat and agent mode that plans multi-file edits and runs commands. Its rise set the pace for the entire coding-agent market.